Why Do Opossums Write Short Stories?
May 2026
Why not? Opossums have a vocabulary too. So it is not unusual for an opossum to pick up a pen and paper to reach for literary heights. Unfortunately, opossums belong to the literary outsiders of the literary scene. They are ignored, torn apart by critics, or have to fight simply to be seen, so as not to disappear into the masses of writers.
Jonas came to writing at a very early age. As a child, he loved to read. Writing was therefore always a part of him. He started in 2018 with essayistic texts. The narrative elements then led him to short prose. Back then he was still writing for the drawer, meaning he wrote primarily for himself. Over a longer period of time, he kept notes, which he wrote in college notebooks. He had at least twenty of them – filled cover to cover with drafts, literary sketches and illustrations.
Over time he developed a feel for stories. Today those notebooks no longer exist. He destroyed them all. His life was not always easy. And so one day last winter he sat down and started writing again. From the three months in which he focused solely on writing, many short prose texts and fragments of thought emerged, which he then collected and published under the above pseudonym – initially as a self-printed book. In August he was given the opportunity to be published in a literary journal.
He is therefore still relatively at the beginning, even though he has been writing for almost ten years. Writing has accompanied him ever since. He has just published a freely accessible literary journal. The opossum keeps writing, tries to build a small readership, and is curious to see how the journey into the vast depths of the literary world will unfold.
The Opossum as Author: Writing Process
May 2026
When the opossum writes, it scratches its brain out. In desperation, it gnaws on the pen. Always ready to put something down on paper. Today we take a look at the writing process of Jonas von der Beutelratte. And learn from a true "pro."
Jonas put down the pen. The manuscript was finished. Now he sat there in front of the stack of paper. Relieved to have managed it. He had finally completed this wretched manuscript. For three months he had sat tirelessly at his desk and written like a madman. Now the real work began. He had to correct the manuscript and then type it up on the typewriter. Tedious. But what wouldn't one do for a hungry readership. He scraped out his last drop of brain matter and hammered away at the machine. Words upon words. On white paper. He typed and typed until he could no more. The pen ate its way into the desk.
A pro, yes. Pros don't doubt. Pros don't cross anything out. Pros don't hurl crumpled pages across the room. Jonas was therefore no pro. Or was he? For he did all of this with a devotion that only someone summons who writes truly, earnestly, hopelessly.
Three months had passed. He still remembered the first sentence. He had rewritten it seventeen times. On the eighteenth attempt he had simply left it as it was the first time and moved on. Perhaps that was the secret: don't stop before you can begin.
Somewhere, deep in the desk, the pen had become wedged. Jonas left it there. He would buy a new one. For the next manuscript. One he would naturally not trust himself to write. And that he would naturally write anyway. That was just how it was with the opossum inside him. He was a symbol of success. Or well on his way there.
Bukowski Was Never the Problem
May 2026
People love blaming Charles Bukowski.
As if an old drunk with a typewriter invented male decay all by himself. As if cigarettes, filthy bars, and broken lives only began to exist once he started writing about them. But Bukowski was never the problem. At most, he was the one who refused to paint over the mold on the wall.
The real problem was always the romanticization of brokenness by people who were never truly broken.
Bukowski did not write about the beauty of misery. He wrote about its monotony. About the smell of cheap rooms. About loneliness that was not poetic, but simply exhausting. His characters were not rebels. Most of them were tired. Defeated men who already knew they had lost. Not heroes. Not role models.
But at some point, people turned it into a costume. Suddenly students walked around carrying worn-out Bukowski paperbacks, drinking cheap beer for aesthetic reasons and mistaking cynicism for depth. The industry turned his words into posters for living rooms. “Find what you love and let it kill you” hung above the beds of people with stable incomes and Spotify playlists called Late Night Thoughts.
Bukowski was never the problem. The problem was the consumption of authenticity.
People wanted the feeling of staring into the abyss without actually falling into it. They wanted dirt, but curated dirt. Depression, but photographable. Outsiderhood, as long as it generated likes. And eventually real decay became nothing more than an aesthetic.
Bukowski probably would have hated most of his admirers. Not out of arrogance, but because he could smell pretension like stale beer. He did not write to look cool. He wrote because he probably would have imploded otherwise.
Today every raw voice is immediately commercialized. Every wound gets branding. Every outsider becomes a character until nothing human is left. Maybe that is the difference between then and now: back then people drank because life crushed them. Today people document the collapse for engagement.
Bukowski was never the problem. The world simply learned how to turn misery into decoration.